A ride of our emotions

“Be happy and the reasons will follow.”

“Do only what makes you happy.”

A single search on Google “Be happy quotes” and we will be bombarded with hundreds of naive and unrealistic quotes which I personally believe are Secrets of Depression and Exhaustion.

Now before I write down anything else, let me clear a few things :

First: I am not at all implying that a person shouldn’t desire to be happy. It is a natural human instinct and it’s not that I don’t want to be happy, my problem is with setting ‘Happiness’ as a goal.

Second: I want to make it clear that I myself have been naïve enough for most of my teenage years and I seriously felt myself on ‘Cloud Nine’ after reading the above-mentioned quotes and alike. But what I later realized is that this doesn’t work. And it took too much thinking to arrive at this conclusion that I think is very important for me currently. One that you can’t always be happy.

Most of the times, I think being happy is temporary and always followed by some of the other action or as a result of previous actions. In short, it is a by-product of our actions and achievements. But there’s this other state of being; being content or being normal which is being neglected these days. And being sad is an emotion which people feel that they should never experience and I disagree completely.

And thanks to Social Media, I think more and more people are just falling into this trap laid down by numerous pages portraying that the world is just rainbows and nothing else.

Now what happens with taking such ideas to the extreme is that we wish to have a constant state of feeling that’s practically impossible and whenever we are not entirely feeling happy we feel depressed and sad.

Inside Out, the movie released in 2015 is a classic example. A Pixar and Disney produced Anime film portray the role of feelings in the best way. The film personifies the five major emotions in Riley’s mind i.e. Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. The story does a great job in conveying a message across of how important Sadness is in anyone’s life. And to be very honest, this film has stuck to me ever since.

And defining happiness in itself is a very challenging task. You can’t define happiness without implying sadness. You see, Happiness and Sadness are both like Poles of Magnet or like two sides of the same coin. You can’t have a magnet with a single pole, just as you can’t have a coin with only a Heads side. In a similar way, you can’t have happiness without Sadness.

And then comes another problem of forcing any sort of emotion or suppressing one. I would take the example of kids for this. There’s this another notion that people feel about kids always being happy. Have you ever observed a child for even a day? And if you have, it would be easy for you to realize how wrong this notion is. Kids are far from being happy all the time. First of all, they don’t even care which mood they are constantly on. They just want to do and try things. They get sad too often. They cry their hearts out. Also, they are very easy to get angry. They don’t force any emotion nor do they suppress any, and that’s what makes them unique.

Now let’s assume we have made happiness our active goal. But then we got to find reasons for it. So, what do we do? We celebrate. What do we celebrate? Well, let’s check what’s the nearest event in the calendar. Every single Birthday of every single member, every single year. That’s at least 6-7 celebrations. Let’s increase the number. Festivals, Friendship Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Monthly Anniversaries or who cares. We’ll just come up with petty reasons and tell the world that we don’t need something big to celebrate. It’s all nothing but a race which doesn’t have a finish line.

We are trying to enjoy so foolishly that at one point it becomes unearned happiness. The one without the struggle behind it. We focus more on short term satisfaction instead of long-term greatness. We want an effect without a cause. We want weekends without weekdays.

I read an amazing line on the Internet: “Nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.”

And that’s exactly what I wanted to say. You can’t force true happiness. Stop shoving down your throat these unrealistic and naive ideas. Be Real. Embrace every emotion. Because maybe Sadness is not an opposite of Happiness, maybe it is a necessary part of it.”

I’ll leave you with two questions ,